Everybody but Rory knows that he's gay. That includes not only his fellow Purgatoria State students but even, he acknowledges, the audience at "Slugs and Kicks," playwright-director John Fisher's latest Theatre Rhinoceros world premiere, a semi-comic chronicle of the college drama student's sexual confusion.

"I know this is a gay play," Ben Calabrese's Rory says, addressing the audience's expectations in the kind of comic fourth-wall explosion that has been a hallmark of Fisher's since his breakthrough "The Joy of Gay Sex" and smash-hit "Medea: The Musical" in the early '90s. But "Slugs" never achieves the heady meta-theatrical and gender-politics mix that's energized many of Fisher's previous plays.

The new piece at Thick House seems more like an early draft or a placeholder than a fully fleshed-out work. Even the metaphor of the title, the name of a game from Rory's childhood, pops up almost as an afterthought in search of an unearned gravitas.

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Besides being in denial, Rory, who may be the only virgin on campus, is a sex magnet. His best friend-housemate Anis (Alexandra Izdebski) is hot to get him in bed. So is their overweening out-gay grad student director, Jerry (Zachary Isen), who wrote the play in which Anis has the female lead. Ditto the sexy Cynthia (Asali Echols), the girlfriend of the studly Giles (Nicholas Trengove), who plays Anis' onstage lover.

It's not giving too much away to say that varying degrees of fulfillment come to Anis, who gets comically carried away working on scenes with Giles, and to Rory at the hands of the unstoppable Cynthia. Nor is that true happiness waiting in Rory's own backyard in the form of his other housemate - the pothead intellectual Marty (Robert Kittler) - the one person with whom he can relax and enjoy life.

The scenes between Rory and Marty tend to be the best written in "Slugs," enlivened by Marty's weed-stoked socio-economic commentary. Anis gets the lioness' share of the comedy, whether propositioning Rory, "rehearsing" with Giles or gobbling up cereal while weeping. But Rory's character remains so thinly developed, in the writing and in Calabrese's overly adolescent performance, that it's hard to become invested in the main story.

It doesn't help that the play's format - college students rehearsing a play, written and directed by one of them, which gets entangled in their sex lives - makes "Slugs" look like an early warm-up for "Medea." On its own, "Slugs" is a moderately entertaining, unevenly performed and haphazardly executed stage show. Compared to the thick web of theatrical layers and head-spinning gender politics in "Medea," it looks like an opportunity lost.

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